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Saturday, 31 March 2012

Facebook Is Building A Search Engine

News getting to us is that facebook is creating a search engine, a team of 20 facebook programmers led by google's former programmer which is at work within the popular site facebook.

The idea, according to two sources, is to take better advantage of the
heaps of content Facebook users create on — and off — the site every
day. With people sharing status updates and supporting brand pages on
the network, as well as using Facebook’s “Like” button to mark articles
and videos from external sites, there is certainly a lot to take
advantage of.

Journalists contacted Facebook for more information and got this
response from a company spokesperson: “We don’t comment on rumors and
speculation around products.”

Google has boosted its presence in the social space recently, opening the Google+ network last fall and a “Search, Plus Your World”
feature to tepid response earlier this year. So it’s interesting to see
Facebook potentially make a stronger move into the search world.

A large-scale shift to a “semantic web,” where online data is is able
to be delivered in more nuanced and complex ways, is gaining momentum
among tech futurists. Wikipedia recently announced a project called Wikidata
that aims to make its content smarter by cross-updating among Wikipedia
pages when they are edited. A more robust Facebook search functionality
would be another step toward that semantic web.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has consistently downplayed the
level of direct competition between Facebook and Google. “I don’t think
that this is going to be the type of situation when one company wins all
this stuff,” he told Charlie Rose of PBS last fall.

If the Businessweek report is true, however, it will add yet another area of heightened competitive overlap between the two Silicon Valley giants.
Would an improved social search engine within Facebook make you use Google Search less? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.